Despite the rising interest in the practice of formative assessment (FA) in language classrooms, research has rarely examined the factors that contribute to differential use of FA. The present study adopts an explanatory sequential mixed-method design to examine differences in FA use among Japanese junior and senior high school EFL (English as a…

One of the key aims of formative assessment in higher education is to enable students to become self-regulated learners (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006). Based on Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick's (2006) framework, this exploratory study investigates which formative assessment practices proposed by them were used by one college EFL writing teacher to…

An experimental design was adopted in the present study to cross-compare the effect of two formative assessments, namely peer assessment (PA) and teacher assessment (TA), with summative assessment (SA) on the improvement of language learners' writing skill and self-efficacy. Writing excellence was operationalized by structural (grammar), lexical…

Assessment is one of the most important elements of student life and significantly shapes their learning. Consequently, tutors need to ensure that student awareness regarding assessment is promoted. Students should get the opportunity to practise assessing work and receive tutor feedback so that they might improve on both the work and their…

With increasing demands on student achievement as set forth by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) (2001), teachers are the catalyst for improving their students' performance (Marzano, 2000). Existing studies on the use of formative assessment as a process by which teachers elicit information of their students' progress and use that information to…

This article outlines the impact of an eight-week Precision Teaching (PT) intervention on the sight vocabulary, reading fluency and reading attainment scores of a group of Irish primary school pupils. This study also sought to evaluate the role of PT in facilitating formative assessment of pupils' progress. Employing a mixed-method approach, this…

This paper reports on teachers' use of concept mapping as an alternative assessment strategy in advanced level biology classes and its effects on students' cognitive skills on selected biology concepts. Using a mixed methods approach, the study employed a pre-test/post-test quasi-experimental design involving 156 students and 8 teachers from…

Although studies have documented teachers' growth in assessing science resulting from professional development or science methods courses, little attention has been given to growth while being prepared to assess a linguistically diverse student population. In this study, the growth of 11 secondary science preservice teachers is documented by…

Research and development of a new type of scoring rubric for the integrated speaking tasks of "TOEFL iBT"® are described. These "analytic rating guides" could be helpful if tasks modeled after those in TOEFL iBT were used for formative assessment, a purpose which is different from TOEFL iBT's primary use for admission…

Government policies designed to redress social inequality are often evaluated by qualitative methods, which prevents the establishment of a causal relationship between policy objectives and outcomes. Social programmes to broaden participation in higher education have been a feature of government policy in Europe, the US and Australia during the…

Classrooms are a primary site of evidence about learning. Yet classroom proceedings often occur behind closed doors and hence evidence of student learning is observable only to the classroom teacher. The informal and undocumented nature of this information means that it is rarely included in statistical models or quantifiable analyses. This…

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has invested in the development and dissemination of high-quality instructional and formative assessment tools to support teachers' incorporation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) into their classroom instruction. Lessons from the first generation of standards-based reforms suggest that intense…

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has invested in the development and dissemination of high-quality instructional and formative assessment tools to support teachers' incorporation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) into their classroom instruction. Lessons from the first generation of standards-based reforms suggest that intense…

An indispensable part of any curriculum design in an educational setting is the analysis of the needs of the learners involved in the context. The needs can be addressed from different perspectives. Among them, the learners' needs in terms of their perceptions toward what constitute learning/teaching and testing processes are of prominent values.…

Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (2001), districts, schools, and educators are pressured to collect, analyze and report data annually regarding student performance. If high-stakes assessments are to be useful tools for educators in their classrooms, the data need to be applicable in conveying meaningful instructional information…